Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  One of the first major academic meetings on the study of folklore was the “Conference on the Character and State of Studies in Folklore,” sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies and held at Indiana University on April 11-12, 1942. Alan was one of the youngest speakers in a room full of some of the world’s best-known scholars, many of whom thought of folklore as only a means of understanding the past. In his talk he laid out a vision of folklore that was as far from the antiquarian as possible. Folklore, he said, should be understood as the ultimate interdisciplinary subject, one so complex that it required linguists, sociologists, anthropologists, musicians, and scholars of literature; in fact, entire university departments should be devoted to its study. Folklore was the product of both individual artists and the community within which they function, and its proper study should include autobiographies of folklore artists and close readings of their repertoires, as well as community-wide studies of what folklore means to the people and how it functions in their lives. Comparative ethnographic and historical studies across regions, countries, and the world should be the next step, with scholars searching for patterns and discovering the principles that govern folklore. This would constitute a science of folklore. To scholars who were happy to spend their lives classifying and ordering written items of folklore like solitary butterfly collectors, this proposal was a bit frightening.

  The seriousness of his talk at that conference was enough to earn him his first invitation to lecture as an academic when Stith Thompson asked him to teach at the newly created Summer Institute of Folklore at Indiana University on June 29-July 11, 1942, along with the likes of John Jacob Niles, Herbert Halpert, and George Herzog. But Alan was not easily flattered, and he reminded Thompson that he was not an academic. When he added that the $150 offered would not cover his expenses and loss of salary, Thompson found the extra money.

  Alan headed back to Nashville by way of Bowling Green, Kentucky, on July 12, to resume the Fisk project in Mississippi, but worked largely without the Fisk people for the next six weeks. On July 17, he again visited Son House, who took him to meet Robert Johnson’s mother: “She told us of her son, spoke of God, her great maker; got happy as we left—prophesying in the dusty yard.” Later he recorded House again, and wrote in his notebook, “Slide guitar, metal body: screams in the night, trains ringing down the tracks, the moans of the lovers and those in pain, a sound that Europe had dreamt of, but never heard.” Alan was so moved by his singing that four months later he wrote and asked if he would like to go to New York City to join the Almanacs. It would have changed the direction for the singing group and made a bold public statement, but House was never able to raise the money for the trip.

  The session was interrupted by a car horn blowing outside. It was the plantation manager, House’s boss, who ordered Alan and Elizabeth to follow him to the sheriff’s office. His memory blurred by time and nervousness, Alan later recalled the humiliation of the sheriff doubting his word, disrespecting his government credentials, and accusing them of being foreign agents or, worse, Yankees. (Elizabeth also recalled a pistol jabbed into her kidneys.) Alan was arrested again later for simply putting his foot on a black woman’s porch.

  In that Delta summer, Alan worked with blind street singers and proud young men in bars, met a middle-class businessman who had studied with W. C. Handy, talked with elderly ladies on their front porches and children playing in the dirt, and took notes on preachers who in their thundering sermons bravely fused the injustices of their small world with those facing an enemy abroad. He recorded hours of prayer meetings, sermons, jokes, field hollers, poems, public occasions, levee songs, minstrel music, soldiers’ songs, ballads, cowboy songs, interviews, string band music, and, near the end of the stay, children’s songs, dances, and games, and also did some filming.

  Even before Alan returned to Washington from Mississippi, Harold Spivacke wrote to tell him that the archive had not been budgeted for any additional money to make recordings for the following year, and any projects that Alan wanted to undertake would have to be related to the library’s war efforts—something, say, on the order of record albums to be sent to the USOs, the United Service Organizations that provided entertainment and recreation for the troops and helped with morale. Alan bitterly responded that he thought the democratic heritage of song should not be abandoned because of the war. More than ever, he insisted, a folklore program was crucial “for morale with teachers, musicians, Negroes and people in the minority field,” and that was something that the archive could foster. Obviously, no one at the library had faith in him, he said, including Spivacke. In any case, he bemoaned, the army would be calling him up soon.

  With the end of the research for the Mississippi project with Fisk near, he asked that his stay there be extended so that he could finish the work, volunteering to do it for free if they couldn’t pay him. Lewis Jones had already offered to stay with him to finish up. In his request for an extension, Alan wrote Spivacke:

  I have been in a territory where the Negroes are not reached by the newspapers or the radio, where the whites are quite defeatist in their point of view, where the Negroes hear about the war 1) “Hitler is going to kill all the niggers if he wins” (from the whites). 2) “This war is the judgment of God on a wicked world. Only Christianity will win through. Kneel down and pray.” (This is the message of the Negro church to the religious Negro.)

  The result of this constant message of the uselessness of action was an apathetic black population, he concluded. The whites of the region were threatened and anxious: “I have had more trouble with local whites on this trip than all the rest put together, because of the situation.” The best means of changing things, he decided, was to work through the black church, the one institution of the black community that had at least a measure of autonomy and hadn’t fallen under the control of whites. He was granted an extension of two weeks.

  Leaving Mississippi in late August, Alan and Elizabeth went through Birmingham to attend the annual session of the Alabama Sacred Harp Singing Convention, where they met up with George Pullen Jackson, a professor of German at Vanderbilt University and the leading authority on southern hymn singing. Sacred Harp, which took its name from the hymnbook The Original Sacred Harp, was an older form of Anglo-American sacred music, with notes written in shapes different from normal music notation to allow untrained singers to follow the melody in a simpler reading form, and the arrangements were set to allow anyone to sing any part he chose. It was truly otherworldly music, with waves of sound sweeping through the church, especially on the first time through a song, when the singers sang without words.

  On his return to Washington, Lomax and John Work remained civil but distant and wary, and were no longer working in league. Word had reached Washington that the Fisk project had come to a virtual standstill, and a Library of Congress memo noted that there was deadlock between the two men “based on professional jealousy” (though that phrase was struck out) that could be broken only if both men were relieved of administrative responsibility for completing the study. Lomax’s superiors at the library and President Jones would take over, with the assistance of Charles S. Johnson, by mutual agreement. A further problem was a rivalry between the music department and the social science department at Fisk. The library proposed that John Work clear whatever he did with President Jones, and a plan was set up to complete the book.

  The war forced shifts of focus and cuts in budgets at both the library and at Fisk. Key personnel were being drafted, and the book that was to emerge from their project fell into limbo. Lomax continued to look for means to support it, and asked the WPA Writers Project for help, but was astonished when they replied that they had been advised by the director of the Mississippi State Department of Archives and History that there were no folk songs typical of the Delta, since it had only been settled recently. In addition, they said, they already had too much material to take on any more. Work continued on the project, but slowly, especially as he had lo
st some of his writing and had to wait for the library to send him copies of their copies, and there was confusion over just what material he had sent them. Work later wrote the library staff that it seemed to him that they were no longer interested in the project, but they responded that there was no one left there to see it through, and a “competent writer” would have to tie all the parts of the report together. President Jones told Harold Spivacke that more would have to be done on Work’s manuscript (now titled “In the Bottoms”) to make it “readable and attractive to the general public,” and that in its current condition it could not be combined with Lomax’s and Lewis Jones’s parts to make a single book. President Jones said he would come to Washington to talk about the book, but that was the end of the matter.

  Five years later Alan started work on his own book about the Fisk/Library of Congress project, and he asked Professor Work if he could make some copies of the recordings that Lomax had made there five years earlier. Work replied that he needed to know why he wanted them copied and whether they would be sold. That was the last contact they had.

  It’s difficult to know what that 1947 book would have looked like, as nothing remains of his plans, but a paragraph in a report he did in 1969 to the National Institute of Mental Health offers a hint of where he would have gone with at least part of it:

  In 1941 and 1942 when I was assistant in charge of the Archive of American Folk Song in the Library of Congress, I made a conventional functionalist survey of the folk song repertory of one county in the Mississippi Delta. With the help of a research team from the Department of Sociology at Fisk University, I collected and analyzed the entire folk song repertory of the Negroes of this Deep South area in terms of age, class, and economic level, and discovered that during the 100 years from which the survey could account, there had been four major shifts in the musical tastes of this area. However, since I could not control the main stylistic factors that were at work and at war in this area, I could not come to any conclusion about the forces that had produced these shifts of taste.

  Alan and Lewis Jones kept in touch over the years, and it was Jones whom he consulted in 1954 when he started work on the manuscript that almost forty years later would became The Land Where the Blues Began. In a series of letters back and forth, Alan asked Jones if he knew what had happened to the work they had done toward a book. Jones replied that Charles Johnson had told him that he had organized the materials in the book and had tried to get it published, but it was rejected in the form it was in.

  Alan had grown up in Washington’s culture, spent his youth in it, and learned how to work the bureaucracy from within, but he had never found a way to completely protect himself within it. Periodic shifts in political alignments in Washington were unpredictable, and if he wasn’t alert he could find even his most trusted colleagues suddenly on the other side. With New Deal projects coming under increasing attack from those on the right in Congress, the work of the archive was being seen by some as frivolous, and by others as politically provocative. When he returned to Washington from Mississippi, Alan learned that the Music Division’s request for an additional $15,000 to expand the archive’s activities had triggered a political battle. A congressman spotted the request in the library’s appropriation bill and turned it into the occasion to speak out against the waste of money in a library headed by the “radical poet” Archibald MacLeish, and a House committee cut out the library’s entire request for increasing acquisitions, so that nothing could be bought for the following year. Although Alan was not mentioned in the hearings, he felt that the library staff held him to blame. The increase to the budget was ultimately restored, but with a proviso that the archive would receive none of it.

  Fearing the end of his run at the library, whether by the draft, cuts in staffing, or a purge, Alan tried to finish as much work as he could and get out as many publications as possible. He and Sidney Robertson Cowell compiled and published American Folk Song and Folk Lore: A Regional Bibliography to make the printed material on American folklore available to the public in a way that the scholars never thought to do. The bibliography was divided into the regions of America and by categories such as occupations, dances and games, white spirituals, and even jazz. Also completed were the three volumes of The Check-List of Recorded Music in the English Language in the Archive of American Folk Songs to July, 1940, which had been prepared by Charles Seeger with the WPA’s support, and edited by Alan. The list was intended as a catalog of the archive’s holdings for educational institutions and libraries, so that copies of the most important recordings could be made available to those who were interested. As it turned out, however, the Library of Congress soon began issuing shellac-based recordings for sale to anyone, a development that Alan had hoped for all along.

  He wrote Macmillan with a proposal for a book that would summarize his work at the archive, explaining, “The burden of the book might be summed up this way. It is our democratic right to speak to the president and we ordinary Americans speak a language as eloquent and beautiful and distinctive and many-colored as any great writer ever wrote. I expect to make this material move out [sic] a more or less personal narrative of my own connection with and impressions of these people.” But the publishers showed no interest in the project,

  In September he applied for a transfer to some other branch of the government, listing New York City as the place where he most preferred to work. When his application was received, it was passed on to the FBI for clearance, and this time a new report was written about him that again claimed he had admitted to his father that he was a member of the Communist Party. But if the FBI took the allegation seriously, it was not used to block him from government employment.

  At President Roosevelt’s request, Archibald MacLeish had set up an agency called the Office of Facts and Figures in October 1941, a branch of the library that lasted only briefly before it was turned into the Office of War Information (OWI) in June 1942. MacLeish then resigned from the library to become one of the new office’s assistant directors. With no one now at the top of the library to defend him and his work, Alan too resigned on October 10, to follow MacLeish to the OWI as an information specialist in its Bureau of Special Services, where he worked as a producer of radio programs for the Armed Forces Radio Service at a salary of $3,800 a year. The OWI was created to build morale and national spirit to prepare the country for what the war would ask of them. It was staffed with some of the most talented writers, actors, and directors in America: playwrights like Arthur Miller and Norman Corwin; writers of soap operas and radio mysteries such as Orin Tovrov (Ma Perkins) and Hi Brown (Girl Intern and Inner Sanctum); actors Richard Widmark, Mercedes McCambridge, Robert Young, and Frank Lovejoy; artists and literary stars like Arthur Schlesinger Jr., James Reston, and Gordon Parks; and producers and directors John Houseman and Nicholas Ray. Ray was John Houseman’s favorite director, and a man who could get soldiers to become actors by encouraging them to improvise and to turn their weaknesses into art, so Houseman made Ray the special projects director for the Western Theater of Operations. (Alan got Bess Lomax a job as Nick’s assistant, and she recalled with amusement Alan warning Nick that if he ever laid a hand on her he’d kill him.)

  The director of OWI was Elmer Davis from CBS, the most popular radio newscaster in America, well known for delivering the nightly news with a Hoosier accent rather than in Broadcast Standard language. Most of the OWI were New Dealers and leftists of one stripe or another, so the power they had been given to address the nation made some in Congress nervous. Davis, for example, used his position to urge President Roosevelt to allow Japanese Americans to enlist in the military, and tried to persuade him to oppose bills that would deprive them of their citizenship and intern them in camps. In the early days of the war many people were willing to suspend judgment on what increasingly looked to them like an agency for propaganda, but as the spirit that unified the country following the Japanese attack dissipated, many of OWI’s programs began to appear a bit too
ardent in their support of Roosevelt’s administration, and the nationalism they promoted seemed to many to have an internationalist tinge to it. Eventually, some in Congress openly accused the OWI of hiring Communists, and with investigations threatened, over thirty of the staff were forced to resign.

  Alan’s first task in his new job was to devise a plan to make the meaning of the war clear to minority groups, many of whom were not English speakers. Stories had reached Washington that there were Mexican mothers crying at railroad station platforms with no idea why their sons were being taken from them; and the government feared that many blacks were ambivalent at best over supporting the war. For Lomax, it was a challenge that he was ready for: “All the things I’d learned about as a folklorist were coming into immediate practical use. Folklore was not just for books; it could be a way of changing people’s thinking.” Two weeks into the job, he had already produced a lengthy proposal, “Plans for Reaching Folk Groups with War Information,” which continued and extended ideas he had developed for the Library of Congress. It was a people’s war, it said, with information about the conflict that should be provided equally to all, and the principles and aspirations that drove the war and won the peace should be those on which the people agreed. To reach everyone they would have to take account of those whose literacy did not extend to reading a newspaper, and even those whose income did not provide for a radio, those isolated by geography, poverty, or bigotry, the people that “the social scientist, when he is thinking in cultural terms, calls the folk.” The way to do it was to understand these people’s forms of communication and to locate those they had authorized to speak for them through folk song. This way, it would be possible to create a two-way system of communication: